Five editions of the Theatre Olympics have taken place so far and each of them has had a different keynote. Previous hosts were Delphi (Tragedy - 1995), Shizuoka (Creating Hope – 1999), Moscow (Theatre for the People – 2001), Istanbul (Beyond Borders – 2006) and Seoul (Sarang. Love and Humanity – 2010). This year’s Theatre Olympics in Beijing starts on 1st November under the title Dream and will feature 47 productions from 22 countries. The Olympics’ first principle is openness to the specific nature of the theatrical traditions of its host country. For a couple of weeks, the host of the festival presents their achievements in the field of theatre and other performing arts. The fixed point in each Olympic programme is a review of the works of distinguished theatre artists from all around the world. This year the ZAR Theatre is among them.
Besides traditional Chinese theatre and performances of artists such as Theodoros Terzopoulos, Tadashi Suzuki and Robert Wilson, three performances of Caesarean Section by the ZAR Theatre are to take place. The performance had its premier in December 2007 at the Grotowski Institute and has so far been presented in a few Polish cities as well as in Paris, London, Florence, Cluj-Napoca and Sibiu (Romania), San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The main line of the performance’s musical structure is based on Corsican polyphonic songs between which Bulgarian, Romanian, Icelandic and Chechen threads have been weaved. The traditional music material, however, has been processed into a contemporary form and completed with an intense choreography. The performance refers to a need for suicide and the suicidal state. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2012, Caesarean Section received the prestigious Total Theatre Award in the Physical/Visual Theatre category, as well as the Herald Angel Award.
Lectures will also be held as part of the Olympics. Jacek Kopciński will speak about theatre in free Poland using the example of the works of a new generation of filmmakers. The editor-in-chief of Teatr monthly magazine will introduce the image of Polish contemporary theatre as well as the Polish mentality, imagination and system of values which are reflected on stage. Monika Blige, a programme director of the Grotowski Institute will present the institute's most important artistic and research projects, as well as an outline of the historical background of its activity in her speech The Jerzy Grotowski Institute – Traditions and Challenges. Jarosław Fret, the theatre curator of ESK 2016, director of the Grotowski Institute and leader of the ZAR Theatre will concentrate on the work of the ZAR Theatre and its associations with the artistic heritage left by Jerzy Grotowski in his lecture Wrestling with Memory – Questions to Jerzy Grotowski